Category: Gardening

Here is a video I recorded in late summer this year of my catnip plant harvest:

Needless to say I smelled just like catnip for the rest of the day. In fact, it was such a powerful smell that I didn’t really want to touch catnip again for at least a week! About a month after this video was made I went back with my clippers and cut the rest of the bush up since it didn’t reflower, I left enough for the plant to grow a little and (hopefully) survive the winter.

Since I harvested catnip… and I have 3 cats, you know what is coming next.

Thats right! Yet another video of my cats enjoying catnip! Hooray!!

For some reason Nice Guy never joins these social events. He is more of a private nip eating kinda guy. Oh well, Lisa and Kyoko really seemed to enjoy themselves.

Last winter my store bought rosemary plant wasn’t doing so well, so I took a cutting while the plant was still okay and managed to grow this rosemary plant in the video.

As you can see the new plant is doing pretty well, so I decided to trim the branches in order to make it become fuller and bushier. I also decided to start more rosemary plants from the cuttings JUST IN CASE winter is tough on the plant again this year.

This video is to instruct on how to create additional African Violet plants from a leaf cutting.

The following is a sort of summary of what was covered in the video and is based on my experience:

Removing leaves from a fully grown African Violet is an important part of owning one of these plants. Since some leaves will be overlapped by other leaves they are not useful to the plant and can be removed and discarded, OR used to start new plants.

When making a leaf cutting, the leaf stem is cut shorter and at an angle to provide space for roots to come from. Trimming 1/3 of the end of the leaf off will stop the leaf from growing larger and redirect energy to growing roots.

Your new plants will be ready to separate from the “mother leaf” cutting once they are large enough and have at least 3 or 4 leaves of their own.

When separating new plants from the cutting I prefer to pull back on the “mother leaf” and let the plants separate the roots naturally. If a plant comes away with no roots it can still grow if you are patient with it.

When replanting the new violets be sure to plant them up on a bit of a mound so that the center of the plant doesn’t get submerged when watered, the plant can rot and die from sitting water. I also water my plants with water which has been left sitting for at least a few hours to become lukewarm and remove some chemicals from it by evaporation.

Watch your new plants for growth of additional plants which are undesirable because they crowd your plant and create lopsided growth. You can tell if you have additional plants developing if growth appears from anywhere besides the center of your plant.

I’m really getting into gardening this spring, even though I only have a “patio garden” and have to grow all of my plants in containers.
Here is a video I did about propagating Rex Begonias from a leaf cutting.